FINAL RESULTS: 2003 Internet Steel Tracked Roller Coaster Poll

The top three steel coasters in 2002 repeated their positions this year. Many more of
this year's voters had ridden #1 Expedition GeForce and it was preferred to both #2 SFNE's
Superman: Ride of Steel and #3 Millennium Force by mutual riders in ratios that approached 2:1.
EGF was also the only steel coaster to be preferred to the Favorite Wood Coaster category,
which would have finished second in the poll, and EGF was preferred over the "FWC" by a
convincing 28 to 12 vote. SRoS:NE and Millennium Force each had two losses and, although MF
was compared against more coasters at the lower end of the rankings and therefore had a greater
winning percentage, SRoS was placed ahead of MF in second due to its 40 to 14 mutual rider
preference over Millennium Force.
Edmonton's Mindbender became the oldest steel coaster to ever finish in the top four of
this poll. The Anton Schwarzkopf designed Mindbender had a previous best of 8th in the poll
and has been operating since 1985, which is ancient by steel roller coaster standards (e.g.
12 of this year's top 23 did not yet exist in 1999). The majority of the few well travelled voters who had ridden it
actually preferred it to #1 EGF and #2 SFNE Superman but Mindbender
lost the mutual rider comparisons to #3 MF, #7 Phantom's Revenge, #8 Top Thrill Dragster, and
tied #20 Raptor otherwise Mindbender, which is located indoors in West Edmonton Mall, would
have finished even higher in the poll.
It should also be noted that Mindbender's #4 finish is the highest that a coaster with
inversions has finished since Montu finished second in the 1999 poll. #6 Nemesis is the only
other coaster with inversions in this year's top ten.
Nitro fell one spot to 5th, Nemesis climbed three spots to 6th, Phantom's Revenge climbed
six spots to #7, Top Thrill Dragster debuted strongly at #8, 1999 #1 Six Flags Darien Lake's
Superman: Ride of Steel fell four spots to #9, and Six Flags Holland's Goliath climbed six
spots to round out the 2003 top ten.
Amongst the top six rides, the mutual rider comparisons went as follows:
EGF was preferred to SRoS:NE 11 to 5, over MF 14-8, lost to MB 2-3, over Nitro 16-2, and over
Nemesis 19-5. SRoS:NE was preferred to MF 40-14, lost to MB 2-4, over Nitro 44-8, and over
Nemesis 12-5. MF was preferred to MB 6-1, to Nitro 45-18, and to Nemesis 17-9. Mindbender was
preferred to Nitro 4-3 and to Nemesis 4-1. Nitro lost the comparison to Nemesis 10-12.
The new (to the poll) for 2003 rides/categories debuted as follows:

With the debut of Top Thrill Dragster at #8, combined with #3 Millennium Force, #20 Raptor,
and #24 Magnum XL-200, Cedar Point is now the park with the top steel coaster duo, trio, and
foursome.
Gouderix again "bottomed" Flashback at the bottom of the poll among much ridden rides,
although several coasters with very few riders had lower winning percentages.
The mutual rider comparisons between the 299 coasters/categories (including
"Favorite Wood Coaster") that had riders take the poll this year will be available
by December 23rd from the website http://www.geocities.com/wcoasterpoll. All 182 ballots
(anonymized) will also be available by December 23rd. This delay will hopefully prevent
any bandwidth problems for the website.
One small accounting change this year, three mutual riders with a preference were required
before any coaster comparison was considered valid in the steel poll.
The following results are presented in a tabular format showing 1999,
2001, 2002, and 2003 placements, giving a better feel for trends and consistencies
in the poll. When viewing this chart, one should expect a coaster's rank
to drop slightly from year to year due to additional coasters debuting in
the poll. Special attention should be paid to the RIDERS column as the
fewer the number of riders, the greater the margin of error.
The detailed 2003 results, the ride forces poll results, the rankings based only on
ride experiences that occurred in 2003, and the top coasters based on those voters who
specified each of the six ride forces as their favorite all follow the multi-year chart below.
Links have been added from many top rides to the ride's page at RCDB.com

Symbols:# - no riders or no riders numerically ranked this coaster that year.
R#- < 5 rider/raters (greater margin for error). (R is the Rank)
Rt- Coaster tied for rank R
- - coaster was not yet built.
n - coaster new or rebuilt this year.

115 persons took the poll in 1999, 98 in 2001, and 152 in 2002, and 182 this year.
The steel coaster poll was not conducted in 2000.

The ride forces 'poll within a poll' was a runaway endorsement of airtime.
The results are similar to those for the wood poll, except that the two
types of airtime were equally preferred here, lateral forces were much less
welcome, and positive G's/loops more welcome than for those who took the wood poll.
Also, "Sensation of Speed" was preferred in the steel poll over
"Out of Control Feeling/Directional Changes" whereas it was the other way around in
the wood poll. The top coasters among those who favored each of the six sensations
are listed at the end of this file.

I also ran the program using only this year's riding experiences. These
results are not as meaningful as there are MANY pairings of coasters
that no rider had ridden both of this year. As you can see, our poll
respondents had ridden an average of 30.0 steel coasters this year. That sounds
good until it is realized that when there are fewer than 1/2 as many ride
experiences it causes there to be an average of fewer than 1/4 as many people
who had ridden each pair of coasters (this year vs. ever).
Therefore, I want to be very clear that the following results based on
only 2003 ride experiences have a much greater margin of error and are only
included here because they may be of some limited additional interest to
some enthusiasts.
Note that one of the top three only had three people who rode it in 2003 vote, and that
none of the top 3 had valid comparisons against each other.